


pour your love to the earth, for the ocean is there if you fall

by glock



Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Minor Character Death, too much ocean/water imagery lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23277175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glock/pseuds/glock
Summary: sink, swim, or survive—wonsik goes through it all.
Relationships: Kim Wonshik | Ravi/Lee Jaehwan | Ken
Comments: 15
Kudos: 14
Collections: RAVI El Dorado Collab





	pour your love to the earth, for the ocean is there if you fall

**Author's Note:**

> warning for some vaguely described violence. i didn't go into detail for anything that is unpleasant. more tags will be added along the way.
> 
> inspired by PO$EI from the el dorado album. there's a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3kQPK4LtxK69AYG7el1mpn?si=x6jvD20_SqKFiWvLA8R9SA) i made too
> 
> this isn't my first fic for kenvi but it's my first published one! definitely more to come soon!! i hope you enjoy this one for now!!

Seasons come and seasons go, and people come and go with those seasons. Wonsik doesn’t keep track of time—not that well, not anymore. Sometimes he tries, but most of the time he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter anyway. All he needs to know is when winter is coming, when summer is coming. 

When the tides come and go. 

When it’s night and day. 

Because when it’s day—he has to protect himself from what they call the walkers. 

But when it’s night—he has to protect himself from something else. Something else that he has learnt the hard way to know is something much worse than the undead that roam the streets in the day.

Humans. 

  
  
  
  
  


Wonsik still remembers the first day the outbreak happened. No one had really believed it— _Train to Busan_ come to life? Nah, that’s impossible. Zombies aren’t even real. Life still went on because well, if life didn’t, then what else could? 

Conspiracy theories (as Wonsik thought at the time) circulated around the Internet, saying that the government had been trying to contain it for months. They were successful for a little while, but something had changed. More and more dead people were coming back to life, much faster than the government could contain it. 

And then people started saying they saw their dead loved ones. Some sort of mechanism that never left the walkers (corpses)—even as their souls had—started bringing them back to their homes, their families. And then it happened on television. Famous personalities getting bitten onscreen because their dead family members had been drawn to them. When that first actor had gotten bitten—that was when all hell broke loose. 

Wonsik had been in Seoul at the time. In his laboratory, specifically. A lab tech had run into the office, switching on the television that hung high on the wall, out of breath as if he had just run there to tell them the news as soon as possible. He probably had, but all of that was forgotten when the television screen finally came to life, and all they saw was blood in the studio where they had been filming the news interview, the screams as the staff working at the broadcasting channel either ran for their lives, or tried to subdue the walker. 

Chaos, and all hell broke loose. 

Wonsik had wanted to make it back home, wanted to drive home for his family, but didn’t manage to. The chaos on the outside rendered it impossible to do so—the military deployed, the streets barricaded, and all Wonsik could hear from the underground basement of the building they were all hustled into were the sounds of explosions that made his co-workers tremble in fear with each one that shook the walls. 

All he could think about had been his family—his parents on a short trip to Jeju Island, his sister having joined them during her summer vacation. Trying desperately to reach his family on his phone, all he had managed was a few Kakaotalk messages that had managed to get through to his family’s group chat. By some miracle, his younger sister Jiwon had replied. 

_We are okay. Stay safe, oppa. Come find us when you are okay too. We love you._

As he desperately typed out a reply, the networks got cut off. His messages were never sent. 

That was the last he had ever heard from his family. 

  
  
  
  
  


It had taken hours before the explosions died down. How long Wonsik had spent down there until the explosions stopped, he knew to the minute. 5 hours and 24 minutes. The incessant bullets and gunshots had been next, and Wonsik could do nothing but bite back tears as he held his hands to the ears of one of the younger lab techs who had been sobbing from panic and anxiety, could do nothing else but comfort her by shielding her smaller body with his own. From what, he had no idea—she had been his sister’s age and Wonsik would have done the same no matter what for Jiwon. How long it had taken before they finally decided to leave the underground basement was much longer. It had taken a full day, 4 hours and 36 minutes—before Wonsik realised he couldn’t stay down there any longer. 

So he had gone upstairs with a few others who had wanted to leave too, scavenging for weapons he could find, stuffing anything he could use into his work backpack that somehow had been left intact at his desk. Pulled apart drawers, stuffing disappeared colleagues’ stashes of snacks into the big pocket, filched the first aid kit from the pantry, ripped a broom from the janitor’s closet apart, and held the long handle in both hands as he quietly sneaked out with the rest of them. 

When he finally surfaced, it had felt like the entire world had gone under instead. 

  
  
  
  
  


They had travelled through Seoul on their own, with their limited supplies and whatever they could scavenge from homes they managed to enter. They had moved as quickly as they could through the district, following the tracks of the extensive metro system, and spending nights in abandoned convenience stores. 

Food hadn’t seemed to be running low as of yet—there were too many convenience stores in Seoul, each stocked with instant foods that last much longer than if it were fresh. Everything had gone down so fast, people had died so quickly that most hadn’t had a chance to stockpile on food and lock themselves in. Most of them never even had a chance, in the first place, Wonsik thinks. 

The walkers were fast—that’s the first thing Wonsik had learned. As fast as someone who had been alive, possibly even faster for those with a relatively intact body. As a group they had been quietly walking through one of the underground stations in the city, when two of them had come rushing at them. Wonsik had somehow managed to fend off one with his makeshift weapon, slamming it against the wall before stabbing through its chest, and Chiwoong managed to run a kitchen knife through another’s head with Inseob’s help. They hadn’t had any time to even think about what they had just done—just killed their first walkers—when they had to hightail it out of there. 

Second thing he had learned: head equals dead. Stabbing them through the chest or any part of the body isn’t enough, slicing their heads off isn’t either. The only thing that works is thoroughly destroying their brains. It’s what makes these walkers work, makes them function, Wonsik speculated. His hypothesis had been confirmed the hard way when they had lost Woosung to a walker they hadn’t killed properly. To this day, it still makes Wonsik’s heart ache like an old wound on a rainy day—Woosung had been young and promising, had a bright future if they ever could make it through the whole thing—and he had died because of their carelessness. Their failure, as his hyungs, to protect him. 

The last thing he had learned had been that the walkers operate by smell. Smell like a living human, you’re dead. Smell like the undead, smell like the rotting flesh, you (ironically) stay alive. It had been an idea brought up by Inseob one time when they had been trapped in a place where they could not head anywhere else, and as much as they had hated it, they were (as Wonsik would have joked in the past to his friends and family) men of science, so they just had to test out yet another of their hypotheses. It had sucked, but it worked—they had sneakily gutted a walker they had found out in a backyard, and slathered all that gunk over themselves, before entering a horde of walkers, slowly making their way through them. 

It had been good, the four of them. Good enough, gave Wonsik enough reason to stay alive amidst the shitshow the planet had become. Then when it became three, Wonsik could see, could _feel_ , that they were jaded. They were weighed down with burden, guilt filling their hearts, their lungs every single night, as they drowned in it. 

And yet, still they marched on. Marched on to each of their old homes from before, taking everything they deemed valuable. Chiwoong recovered an old ring given to him by his grandmother, and then his parents—meant for him and his future significant other, a blessing from his family to settle down happily and peacefully. Inseob’s home had been nearby, and he had been more pragmatic—he had scanned his home, in which he had been living alone, deeming nothing of importance to recover. He had grabbed his favourite book, bookmarked with a photo of his family, and nothing else. 

As for Wonsik, he didn’t take that much either. People thought him sentimental—and he was, there was no denying. He is, still. But he had moved out of his family home too when he had gotten his job at the laboratory, and there hadn’t been many traces of his family there. He did, however, carefully slide out an old picture of him and his parents and Jiwon, from many years ago at his sister’s art awards ceremony, and put it into his backpack. 

And then right before they had left, he had stood in front of one of his most prized possessions. 

It’s a beautiful paedo jingum that his parents and grandparents had gifted him when he had finally achieved the 1st _geup_ in his kumdo studies, before he had enlisted in the military. It had been the most beautiful thing he had ever set his eyes on—a symbol of all the hard work and effort he had put into attaining the highest rank in the martial art. He never parted ways with it even when he moved out, never left it at his parents’ place, and had a custom rack installed on his living room wall, specially for the sword. 

Inseob and Chiwoong had watched in awed silence as he carefully took it off the rack, feeling the familiar weight in his hands, before he had unsheathed it and inspected the sharpness of the blade. He had run his index finger along the wavy grooves engraved into the blade, an odd feeling settling in his chest as he stared at his distorted reflection. 

The waves certainly would part for him with this.

Little did he know, they would cut him up into little pieces too. 

  
  
  
  
  


They had come across an abandoned military vehicle one day—the interior filled with weapons. Their first time coming into contact with actual guns and ammunition since the time they each spent in the military, years and years back. They had hurriedly taken all that they can because in the situation they are in anything that can kill—walker or human—would be helpful. 

They had headed into the backyard of a random house they passed by, and cleared out the area before commencing practice. 

The guns had changed a little since they’ve been enlisted, but they experimented with it, the feel of the barrel and body familiar in their fingertips as they got into the appropriate shooting positions, lining up old flower pots and beer bottles as targets in front of them. 

They tested out everything, being careful not to use up too many bullets, and made necessary adjustments. Wonsik had struggled to remember what exactly to do, because he had never been much of a gun man, but Inseob—part of the weapons engineering brigade back in the military—had advised him on what to do. Wonsik still preferred to use his jingum, just because the weight, the feel of it felt more familiar to him, more safe. Guns felt more like uncharted territory to him. 

Much as he tried not to use the guns they had, he had been forced to use it more times than he would have liked. It often caused a lot of noise that attracted other walkers, and they would be forced to run away as quickly as they could. Still, he would use it whenever the need arose—while his jingum remained safely sheathed in its black scabbard slung across his back. 

Bit by bit, Wonsik had started feeling comfortable in the uncharted territory he once couldn’t really bring himself to conquer. 

  
  
  
  


Days had become months of routine activity. Sleep, wake up, eat, scavenge, keep themselves moving in hopes of finding a good place to settle down in, realise it’s futile, cry themselves to sleep, rinse and repeat. They learned to comfort one another, bring each other out of the dark, as best as they could.

He had become stronger too, both physically and mentally. So much of his body fat had turned into muscle, even more than before everything had happened, even when he had been working out before. He felt his mind turn primal—survival at the top of his priority list, food and water and staying alert 24/7 at the forefront of his mind. It was so tiring, so exhausting, and it had been so difficult, but at some point they had started surviving not for the aim of seeking out their families as they once sought to do, but keeping themselves alive for the other two, and to a lesser extent, for themselves. 

They had found a working car one day, somehow managed to hotwire it, decided to max out the battery and fuel in it by driving somewhere to get out of Seoul, and Inseob had propped his feet up on the dash, fiddling with the radio frequencies as Wonsik drove. 

Drove to where, they hadn’t been exactly sure. But Wonsik had thoughts of bringing them out to the countryside, where maybe it might be easier to live. 

To lead a life of less killing, less misery, less crying. 

More happiness, more peace, is what Wonsik desperately hoped for himself, for Inseob, for Chiwoong. 

It had been a peaceful afternoon. They had had the windows lowered to save the car’s battery life, the cool spring wind blasting through the interior of the car. Wonsik had revved up the speed when he saw a walker in the middle of the road—they jumped in their seats as the wheels crushed the walker, a sickening splat resounding in the quiet surroundings. 

Then they had heard voices crackling on the radio, and Wonsik’s grip on the steering wheel had tightened as he sucked in a deep breath. Inseob scrambled to tune it back to the frequency at which they had heard the voice. A man, in a steady tone. Repeating the same messages over and over. Wonsik still has it ingrained in his memory to this day. 

_Safe haven. Busan. Follow the signs to Mt. Baekdu._

“We have to go,” Chiwoong says. 

Wonsik checks the signs they pass by on the highway. They could still turn into the path to Busan. They were only halfway. 

“But what if it’s not what it says it is?” Inseob asks. “What if- what if it turns out to be a trap?”

“Inseobie’s right,” Wonsik says, but he does keep the pace of the car slower than it had been. “We need to think this through. We haven’t had a good track record with humans so far.” 

“But we can’t keep drifting like this forever.” 

A tense quiet falls over the interior of the car, with only the whirring of the engine disrupting it. Wonsik must admit that the idea of settling down someplace safe, where there are more than just the 3 of them, sounds like a great idea. Apart from happiness, it most importantly sparked something else in him—hope.

Hearing the name Mt. Baekdu, hope had bloomed in him like the cherry blossoms that had recently started sprouting on the trees they passed. It had been one of the myths that his mother had always told him and Jiwon as children for a bedtime story. 

It told the story of the rebirth of humankind after a great flood—Namu Doryeong, the son of a laurel tree spirit, surviving the flood and floating along the waters on the tree spirit as he had rescued those who needed help. They eventually reached an island made up of the peak of the highest mountain in Korea, Mt. Baekdu, where they had found an old woman and two young girls who had survived the flood as well. Namu Doryeong had won the challenge posed to him by the old woman with the assistance of the ants and mosquitoes he had rescued previously, and had gotten to marry one of the young girls, creating the next race of humans. 

It seems awfully apt at this point in time, Wonsik thinks wryly. To have a safe haven named Mt. Baekdu—how confident, how safe it must be, for the people living there to deem it untouchable from all the shit going on in the outside world. He wants something like that for himself, he thinks, wants something like that for the two other men he loves and wants to protect from the bottom of his heart. 

“Okay,” Wonsik says, breaking the long silence. In the rearview mirror he sees Chiwoong’s head whip to look at him, and Inseob turns too. “We can go, but we will only approach after we have scouted the place out. I am not taking any chances at all.” 

Chiwoong had whooped; ever the cheerful one in their little trio. Inseob hadn’t said much, but he had always calmly and coolly followed along with the plans of the other two, doing his part efficiently and effectively. 

They had grown in their time together to be the ultimate tag team, a trio of menaces who had learnt from one another, grown from one another. Wonsik and Inseob had taught Chiwoong how to aim and shoot better, a byproduct of their more extensive training in their respective military units. Chiwoong had taught them survival and camouflage techniques that had come through for them more often than not. 

They had been his colleagues, and at some point they had become brothers, a family. 

Wonsik would never let anything happen to them, come hell or high water. 

  
  
  
  
  


But hell catches up with him eventually, and Wonsik feels hatred flood through him from top to bottom. Anger pulls him down deep, his lungs fill with anguish, and grief suffocates him, before guilt delivers the killing blow and drowns him. 

As he sobs with Inseob dying in his arms, Chiwoong’s cold dead body lying a few metres away, he thinks that he may be better off joining them instead. It’s not fair, the way _he_ got to continue living and they didn’t. 

“Do… it…” Inseob manages to pant out, despite the giant wound gushing blood at his chest. A single bullet that had been shot, and lodged itself in his ribs. Chiwoong had been beaten to death, Inseob shot, and Wonsik hadn’t been able to do anything about it. 

“N-no, I can’t,” Wonsik chokes, trembly hands trying to press themselves to Inseob’s wounds, to try and put pressure on it. Inseob gasps, a strange wheezing sound leaving him, and Wonsik cries harder. 

“It hurts, it really… hurts,” Inseob whispers. “You have... to.” 

Wonsik shakes his head aggressively, and he feels like he’s standing in the corner of the room instead, watching himself hold Inseob to his chest, a hyperfocused gaze that attempts to ignore the carnage in the room—the corpses everywhere, all irrelevant except for two. 

“For us,” Inseob says, and he has a sudden coughing fit, and it makes even more blood spew out of his chest, a trickle down his lips and chin. “You can… do this...” 

Wonsik doesn’t think he can, but he has to. He doesn’t have a timeframe that will be gracious to him—any minute now the bodies that haven’t been shot in the head will start reanimating. 

That includes Chiwoong’s. 

Wonsik squeezes his eyes shut tight, rubbing the tears out of his eyes with one quick hard wipe, and opens them again. He’s biting so hard on his bottom lip that he can taste it draw blood, the metallic tang on his tongue so unpleasant that it makes him want to vomit.

He sees Inseob give him a reassuring nod. It was something that they had established and agreed upon early on into the outbreak—if anyone died, the others were to make sure that they are truly and really dead. None of them had wanted to turn into one of those things, and they were never going to let each other turn. 

Wonsik picks up a pistol lying down on the ground, aiming it at Inseob’s head with one oddly steady hand, and readies himself to give Inseob his coup de grâce. Inseob closes his eyes, and he looks so at peace. 

Wonsik takes a small breath. 

He aims. 

He shoots. 

  
  
  
  
  


It’s resounding, the gunshot loud and his ears ringing, but it’s clean. Inseob shouldn’t have felt any pain from it, and that’s what allows Wonsik some peace of mind. He does the same for Chiwoong, before he throws the pistol away, flinching as if it burns him inside out. 

He pulls their two bodies together, finding a flamethrower the previous occupants of Mt. Baekdu had been using to burn the remains of the people they had been cutting up and eating, and lights them both up. There was no way he could bury them, and as much as he wishes to build a pyre for them, he can’t. He thinks that they deserve not to be decomposing bodies left in a forgotten warehouse, at least. 

It’s rage that overcomes him next, as he picks up one of the SMGs lying around, and furiously sprays bullets into the bodies of the other corpses. He carefully avoids their heads, relishing the way their bodies become bloody mush. 

Head equals dead, and in this moment, all Wonsik wants is these assholes to remain as disgusting rotting creatures on this godforsaken earth. 

  
  
  


The warehouse is cold and empty, even with the fire that burns within. Wonsik retrieves his jingum from where those bastards had thrown it the moment they had them surrounded, and straps it on his back, an assault rifle in his hand as he loots all the bodies for what they are worth. He comes across their weapons stash, a room stocked full of guns and ammunition, even some artillery, which he feels absolutely zero guilt in stealing. 

He takes as much as he can, filling a duffel with extra guns. It should come in useful at whichever base camp he sets up along the way. 

Looking through the wired barricades that separate him from the outside world, he watches as a wave of walkers, attracted by all the gunfire and explosions, make their way to the front entrance of the community village. He winds the crank at the side, eyes on the walkers the entire time. 

He watches the giant metal gates part. He walks out, turns, and darts into a park nearby. 

He leaves the floodgates open, and allows the waves to completely overwhelm what was once Mt. Baekdu. 

  
  
  
  
  


Being alone on his journey makes Wonsik more careful. He looks behind his shoulder a lot more, because Inseob and Chiwoong aren’t there to watch his back anymore. He eats more, because there are no others to share the food he manages to scavenge. He drinks, he sleeps, much like he used to. 

The only difference is the stark silence. He walks, runs, fights, eats, drinks, sleeps, all in complete silence—there is no one else to talk to. Not anymore. 

He sometimes wishes he could still get his hands on alcohol for a drink. It wouldn’t help him forget, but it would at least help him sleep. Now he can’t close his eyes without seeing Inseob and Chiwoong’s bodies, the nightmare that happened in broad daylight, in living reality. 

Alcohol is relatively easy to come by—he had found a bottle of whiskey with Inseob and Chiwoong before, and had locked themselves in the backroom of a GS25 well before they had downed the whole bottle between the three of them. In most places they had gone to there were still bottles of beer and soju and even bottles of makgeolli, left forgotten. 

One time when it had been particularly bad, he had gotten his hands on some soju in the storeroom of another convenience store he had passed. He had locked himself in, the way they had used to, and drunk himself silly. He had woken up the next day, face crummy with dried tears, and limbs numbed with misery. 

He does the best he can, not to stay alive, but to wipe those nightmares away. 

So to avoid the pain Wonsik stops thinking. He pushes those memories deep down inside, and lets anger and rage rise to the surface instead. 

Hatred flows through his veins, seeps through his entire being, his heart and soul—much like veins of water that seep through cracks in rock and stone, slowly breaking these immovable, once invincible objects, from the inside bit by bit. 

The more he breaks, the less afraid he feels. He wields his jingum more, stabbing and slicing it through arms and legs and torsos and heads, alive or undead. He stops using guns whatsoever. He keeps them on him, but he refuses to use them. It feels much better to be up close and watch with his own eyes the expressions that flit through the faces of the countless things he kills. 

He kills without mercy when it’s men he encounters—when women beg he lets them go, when they fight back, he doesn’t. As for children, he refuses to injure or kill them at all. 

He starts to keep a score, because the walkers are nothing to him, but humans are worth even less. 

It gets tiring after a while to keep a body count because there are so many, so he stops. 

The water that caused those fissures and fractures become replaced by the blood on his hands, now coursing through him like an angry river. 

He dives headfirst into the dark murky waters, and parts the waves all on his own. 

  
  
  
  
  


Wonsik becomes another person. He knows it, he feels it, but he doesn’t try to stop it. 

It’s funny, because none of the people who had known him before would even recognise him now. 

He had wanted a clean slate, to be washed clean of everything that he had had to do. 

It’s blood and guts and rotting flesh that cascades over that slate now, chipping it away bit by bit. 

Fate is a funny little thing, he often thinks—why give him people to love, and then make him lose them? There shouldn’t really be a point then, right? 

He yearns to become skin and bones, to live with no heartbeat, no aching pain in his chest that doesn’t only start hurting on cold rainy days like the old injury on his ankle, but hurts all the time without the pain ever truly going away. 

He desperately wants a tsunami to come—an earthquake to destroy everything he once knew, huge waves that are greater than anything else, to wash everything away, clean and rid the world of the rot it harbours. Wants it to do the same to his mind too, wipe everything clean from his memory.   
  
  
  
  


But fate is a funny little thing, and that tsunami he desired so desperately comes for him much faster than he expects, a mere few days later. It rocks his world, turns his life of solitude completely upside down, almost literally. 

It’s not something that he expects, but the thing he expects the least is that the tsunami meant to give him a clean slate in this life comes in the form of a certain person. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! yell at me on [twt](http://twitter.com/raviluvr420) or [curiouscat](http://curiouscat.me/ravbub)


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